A couple of friends at work have been after me for years to watch "The Wire," an HBO series on crime in the city that ended a year or two ago. I never got around to it, and then one night - not long ago - I found the first season on "HBO Selects," and I got hooked. "The Wire" is simply overwhelming, often depressing, with the kind of scenes that can leave you desolate and staring at the ceiling at night.

It also offers glimpses of a truth we've see all too often with kids we care about, children who start off with bright smiles and great hope, then get sucked down by the devastating rhythms of the neighborhoods around them. So I have trouble pulling myself away from this series, and after I got as far into it as I could on HBO, I took a drive tonight to one of the chain video stores to pick up the next couple of episodes.

They were gone, checked out. So I started wandering the aisles, nodding at a few men and women alo staring at the racks, all of us doing the well-rehearsed dance between new releases and classic titles. I was returning "Up in the Air," the Pixar flick I'd just watched with my family, and when I finally settled on a movie I wanted, I walked to the front to swap movies.

A couple of clerks were at the counter. The guy who took care of me noticed "Up in the Air" and said rhetorically: "Will Pixar ever make a bad movie?" The other clerk started weighing in on the plot, and then the three of us stood there for a while talking movies, and as I headed out the door it hit me how much I enjoy the video store. Often, I'll get into brief conversations with people from wildly different walks of life, people offering brief takes or advice on what they've seen, and even if I utterly reject the recommendation, these moments remain instants of communion.

I've read in the papers how the big corporations would like to shut down these video stores, to get rid of the employees and dump the overhead. That's why we get the big and often obnoxious push to "overnight" our movies from home, a push that negelcts the spontaneous pleasure - on any given night - of simply wandering the aisles, searching for a find.

But I think there is something even more to the video store. The milkman is gone. The paper boy no longer collects at the door. The meter reader can use an electronic clicker as she drives past the house. More and more we are alone, solitary on the couch, our lives built around devices most appropriately called "remotes," and the chance for community grows all too rare.